Kelly Norton is a designer and software engineer living in the South. He holds degrees
from Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and from the MIT Media Lab
where he studied under John Maeda. From 2006–2012, he was a software engineer at Google
working on Google Web Toolkit, Speed Tracer, Google Chrome and other stuff. He co-founded
Connexxia LLC in 2000 to help universities effectively recruit high school seniors through
online social engagement. He was co-founder at Monetology, makers of fine software products Homebase.io and FullStory. He worked on search at Etsy. Now he is loving what he does as he makes things at MailChimp.

PHP AND THE CASE OF SWALLOWED ERRORS
We recently solved the mystery behind a pattern of failures that have been happening very infrequently over a long period of time. The culprit turned out to be a very suprising bug in PHP's MySQL driver, so I thought it might be worthy of a public blog post.

S(H)AVE THE BEARD?
I read on the Internet that the beard trend is over. That's great news because I'm not trendy and I decided to stop shaving at the beginning of the year. I made it a few weeks without arousing any suspicion that I intended to keep the beard, but now it's time time decide: do I s(h)ave the beard?